At the Mammeo restaurant in Frankfurt, Germany, the diners eat like cavemen—only ingredients that humans ate in Paleolithic times are allowed in the dishes.
The so-called paleo diet limits itself to foodstuffs our ancestors would have hunted or gathered in the Stone Age: meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, fruit and vegetables, mushrooms, nuts and honey.
Anything which is produced by farming society is ignored: that means grain is out, and hence bread and muesli. Milk as well as yoghurt and butter are verboten. So is sugar.
Nutritionists are largely critical towards the diet, saying it brings no benefits.
In Mammeo, the milky froth on the cappuccinos is made from coconut milk and the hot chocolate is made from almond milk.
The tacos on the lunch menu are made from plantain, and the sour cream for the green sauce is made from cashew nuts.
Sariya Forkel opened the restaurant a year ago. Until now it has been more of a cafe serving lunches, but from mid-May, the 28-year-old wants to open it up on weekend evenings and serve “really nice steaks.”
She has few predecessors. In Berlin, a restaurant called Sauvage opened in 2011 in the trendy Neukoelln district, and was successful enough to open a second, larger branch two years later.
In the fashionable areas around Frankfurt’s Berger Strasse, vegan restaurants and cafes have also been springing up over the past few years. In some respects, Mammeo could be seen as a alternative to them—a refuge for meat eaters.
But many of its diners come for other reasons; for example, because they are lactose or gluten intolerant. Forkel has been following the paleo diet for the past three years. “I didn’t want to eat industrially processed foods any more,” she says.
A hairdresser by training, she says she has always loved cooking and baking. So she decided to open a restaurant “in which I would like to eat”.
Her restaurant’s motto is, “Real Food”. Paleo diets have had a longtime following in online forums, among specialist cookbook writers and providers of offbeat seminars.
Among them is Sabine Paul, founder of the PalaeoPower Institute of Germany. On her website she promises adepts they will get “bubbling energy with the natural diet of our fit forefathers”.
Susanne Klaus, who leads a working group on the physiology of metabolism at the German Institute of Human Nutrition, says she cannot commend the Stone Age diet. “Another slightly nonsensical fad,” she says dryly.
The trend goes back to a theory by the founder of the movement, Loren Cordain. He believes humans are not built to digest carbohydrate-rich agricultural products because their digestive systems have not altered since the Stone Age.
But according to Klaus, there is “no scientific basis” for that. “Apart from that, we don’t know exactly what people ate in the Stone Age.”
It makes no sense to exclude whole categories of food from the diet, she says, “The best thing [is to eat] a normal, broad palate of food, with as much variety as possible.” Klaus thinks it’s good that the paleo diet only uses fresh, unprocessed foods.
Sabine Lanius, 49, who travels a lot and has been following a paleo diet for the past six months, says it was the fresh-produce idea that convinced her. She had never been to a strictly Stone Age restaurant before she found Mammeo. “You can find something paleo on the menu of any decent restaurant.”